Plymouth Magazine-Summer24-DIGITAL - Flipbook - Page 3
Reading the Stories of Our Lives
By Rev. Dr. Karen D. Scheib (she/her)
It’s very likely you told someone a story
in the past week. Maybe you shared your
great-grandmother’s pumpkin pie recipe
with your granddaughter and told her
how it was passed down through the
family. Perhaps you admitted to your
good friend that you dented the car
bumper while backing into your garage
door (that would be me). Maybe you
and your spouse discussed future plans:
volunteering following retirement, or
a trip to Italy. We tell stories to share
information, a funny anecdote, or
imagine what’s next. Yet stories do more.
When we tell a story about ourselves
—our lives, we reveal who we are, what
matters to us, and how we see the world.
Whether drawn on cave walls, recited
around a fire, danced, performed, shared
at the dinner table, or posted online,
stories are an essential part of human
life.1 The centrality of story in human
life may not only be a product of culture.
It seems our brains are wired for story.
Neuroscientists Antonio Damasio says,
“Story telling is something the brain
does naturally and implicitly.”2 We don’t
experience our lives as a “collection of
naked facts of raw events,” rather our
minds create stories to make sense of
the vast barrage of sensory perceptions,
emotions, and thoughts accompanying
everyday experiences sorting what is
important to note and what is not.3
Stories not only help us make sense of the
world around us, but also communicate
our identity—our sense of self. We may
think of our stories as something we
possess. I have a story. You have a story.
Narrative psychologists, who study the
formation of identity through story,
suggest that we are stories. Our lives are
not simply like a story, “on some basic
level, it is a story a life story.” 4
We come to know one other through
sharing our stories, while exploring our
own stories grants us a deeper level of
self-knowledge. Narrative psychologist
Dan McAdam says it well: “If you want
to know me, then you must know my
story, for my story defines who I am. And
if I want to know myself, to gain insight
into the meaning of my own life, then I
too, must come to know my own story.”5
We are not the sole author of our life
stories. As children, we absorb the
stories of our family, our culture, and our
religious communities. In adolescence
we draw on these stories as we begin to
shape a sense of identity. Story formation
is a life-long process. Our stories gain
complexity as we accumulate new
experience and knowledge. We may
revise old stories through new insights.
As Christians, we view our stories
through God’s unfolding story of love
and grace. God coauthors our life stories.
Rev. Dr. Karen D. Scheib
Emerita Professor of Pastoral Care
Candler School of Theology, Emory University
1
Melissa Mendoza, “The Evolution of Storytelling”,
Reporter, May 1, 2015. eporter.rit.edu/tech/evolutionstorytelling#:~:text=Storytelling%20originated%20
with%20visual%20stories,written%2C%20printed%20
and%20typed%20stories, (accessed 10,12,2020
2
Antonio Damasio, “Self Comes to Mind: Constructing
the Conscious Brain”, (New York: Pantheon, 2010), 311.
3
Karen Scheib, “Pastoral Care: Telling the Stories of
Our Lives”, (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2016), 3 (citing
William A. Randall and Elizabeth McKim, “Reading
Our Lives: The Poetics of Growing Older”, (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2008,) 5,8.
4
Scheib, 2016, 4.
5
Dan P. McAdams, The Stories We Live By: Personal
Myths and the Making of the Self, (New York: Guilford
Press, 1993), 11.
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